Terry Teachout on ...

... Horton Foote: Poet of the Ordinary. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... Foote specialized in a kind of play whose quiet virtues were and are easy to overlook. He spent virtually the whole of his career writing about the daily life of tiny Texas towns not unlike Wharton, the one in which he was born in 1916. His characters were seemingly ordinary, his plots deceptively uneventful. "The Trip to Bountiful," the best known of his 60-odd plays, is the story of a sickly old woman who hasn't seen her home town in 20 years, longs to do so before she dies and decides one day to go there. That's all there is to it, and if you prefer to spend your leisure time watching blow-dried movie stars hopping into bed with one another, then "The Trip to Bountiful" is not and will never be your kind of show.